Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday March 16, 2012 @10:15AM
from the enjoy-your-friday dept.

Barbara, not Barbie writes with this quote from an article at AlterNet about how the average work week is becoming longer, and why that's not a good thing:
"... overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition, and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can't focus. They spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that they'd never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they're fried. Robinson writes that he's seen overworked software teams descend into a negative-progress mode, where they are actually losing ground week over week because they're so mentally exhausted that they're making more errors than they can fix. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law. We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."

Mandatory overtime for like the last 3 years - it was fun until they stopped paying for any overtime. Only way I escaped was to work remote to pursue an MBA. And now what do I have to look forward to? Management Consulting or Investment Banking careers that have 60+ hour weeks as the norm.

To the creature that is the angry wife, the ONLY justification for not being home, catering to her every wish, unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning the garage, because you're lucky to have her to cook shitty potatoes for you, buddy, is if you're out bringing in more money so she can buy more things for you to carry home for her. Any other activity is tantamount to infidelity. This is one of the major reasons my angry wife is now an angry ex-wife (which still sorta sucks but not nearly as badly).

No, don't believe this. This is actually a shallow depiction of the magnificence that is golf.

Golf is a sport that is several hundred years old and beloved by nobleman and commoner alike. It is truly the essence of man enjoying the peaceful tranquility of nature. The swipe of a 5 iron on a cool Spring day. A majestic Titleist ball floating serenely though the air as if it were your very own personal, fluffy cloud. The light "thonk" sound as it descends perfectly on the green, setting you up for that perfect putt that will bring you one under par for the hole. Truly, golf is a sport for OF COURSE IT'S ABOUT THE BEER-SERVING BLOND WITH BIG TITTIES!

We can whine all we want about the 40 hour work week, but no one is willing to unionize in order to get back to it. Can you imagine a white collar middle-management union? People would rather put in 80 hours as an "assistant manager" at McBurger Queen rather than be classified in their own minds as a worker.

As for IT, goodness no. It would require a reshaping of the laws that have been created. There are many laws in place that keep IT workers down. The luddites couldn't dare have an intellectual revolution on their plates, after all.

Unionize? What? I make it clear when I start a job that I will not work over 40 hours a week unless it's a once or twice a year occurrence. If an employer doesn't like that then they're free not to hire me. Considering I just landed a new job after noting this in each of my 5 interviews with the company (and all of the other interviews I went on elsewhere which netted me 4 other job offers) it doesn't seem to be much of a problem in my industry.

There is also the point of getting your work done. I'm efficient and good at what I do. I worked over 300 projects last year and got them done on an average of -3 days of projected deadline. I missed one deadline in the entire year and that was due to external forces. If I can handle that kind of work and push out 99.9% error free stuff, who the fuck cares if I don't work 40+?

I have worked with plenty of inefficient people who spend a good chunk of their day socializing, taking 1+ hour lunches daily, or who simply aren't all that great at what they do. These are the people who seem to end up "just having to work 40+ hours to get it all done".

Stop fucking around and do your job and go home. Coupled with clear expectations at the outset we won't need to have articles like this one written.

Um... excuse me. 'Socialism' has the word 'Social' in it and that implies people working together and with other people. It's now the 21st C. and such things as 'civilization' are now passe and strictly for the lower classes. If you are going to get anywhere you need to become a loan wolf who's ready to do whatever is necessary to get ahead in life. And remember, if there's anyone who's doing better than your or is still happy, you haven't won and in fact are just a looser like everyone else. The most perfect example of new world success is the Frazetta picture of Conan the Barbarian standing on top of a pile of dead enemies, with a hot chick grabbing his leg so a little of his bodaciousness will rub of on her.

Anyone who believes otherwise is obviously one of those weaklings who think civilization and society are good things and that life is more than a zero sum game with a trajectory right to the bottom./Thurston Howell III voice

And here I am yet again without mod points when I really need them. I've said for a long, long time that the best societies are a healthy mix of both capitalism and socialism. Socialism for things that private industry cannot or is ill-equipped to handle (for example, major infrastructure projects, things such as health insurance in which free enterprise has a perverse incentive to screw its customers over, and things that are deemed essential for life or meaningful societal progress), capitalism for everything else.

This doesn't mean that the petty bickering that goes on now wouldn't happen; people would still argue over what private industry cannot handle and what is considered, for example, "meaningful societal progress." Still, the sooner people stop thinking of socialism as a bad word, the sooner we'll actually be able to regain and retain our position as the global superpower. Unfettered capitalism is just as bad for society as unfettered socialism. Look at a place like, say, Somalia, where there is virtually no government to speak of and individual liberty is taken to an extreme--if you want your neighbor's stuff there's absolutely nothing stopping you from simply taking it, provided you have a band of mercenaries that are skillful enough to go get it. Is this really any better than a place like, say, Cuba or China?

That's what's being lost in today's political discourse. The notion of a happy medium, the idea that both systems have things to offer and lessons to learn.

Part of the problem is there will always be people willing to work more than 40 hours per week, meaning those who do not will be seen as "less productive" (manager-ese for "lazy"). Whether or not you get fired, there will be incentive to work just a few more hours per day, or skipping lunches (this is where many of my OT hours come into play - that's 5 a week), etc, to keep your *perceived* productivity competitive. Without long-term efficiency data and organization to support a mandated 40 hour work week, it just won't happen as those extra hours start creeping past 50 per week.

Looking back at my own work week, even *trying* to work only 40 hours, I usually put in 50+, more when you count the things I do from home or on a weekend. While I actually don't mind this (it's often easier to answer an e-mail at home than to waste productive time the following morning), as long as it's on my terms, I loathe knowing that it can be required of me. Forced OT makes me feel less like a team-member and more like a black box; requirements go in, work comes out, who gives a shit if the "equipment" overheats and the work quality suffers, so long as it gets done.

Maybe that's what needs to change; we need a bigger say in deciding when we work and what incentives - especially when we're salaried - we get for working OT (within reason; there are asshats who hate their jobs and will demand a 5 hour work week with a free Dodge Charger for working 7, screwing everybody in the process).

I don't know what job market you're talking about. Me, I'm straight out of college (only a lowly undergrad), making well above average starting wage for a software developer, working a solid 40 hours per week, and I had multiple excellent offers to choose from. If my employer started demanding constant unpaid overtime, I could easily leave and have a new job in no time. And no, I had no special connections or friends in high places. I attended career fairs and applied to online job postings. Disclaimer: this is in Canada, but I work for a US corporation, and I'm always hearing about how everyone in the US is desperate for talented programmers.

Until we have a health care system that is not tied to employment, this will never happen. It is MUCH cheaper for an employer to squeeze more hours out of several workers than to higher an additional worker.

This is actually the strongest argument for completely socialized medicine: If everybody gets health care, always, from the same source, then it's more expensive (in hourly positions) to hire 1 person to work 60 hours per week than it is to hire 2 people to work 30 hours per week. And it's the sort of thing that every industry that isn't health care ought to be pushing for, because the benefits far outweigh the added taxes.

You're still going to have a problem with workers that are considered 'exempt', which includes almost every American on/. with a job, as well as doctors, lawyers, and many other professionals. My understanding is that in Europe, professionals who don't work for themselves are not considered exempt from limits on how long they can be required to work.

The argument in the summary should have stopped at using the argument based on productivity. If your worker will make less mistakes and be more productive by working less, you want your worker to work about 40 hours.

"For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't."

This, however, doesn't follow. If a 40 hour a week worker is more productive I might not need the extra worker if I'm getting more from my team. However, that may mean I can put my capital to better use in a different area, not necessarily software development.

The author also assumes that all man-hours are interchangeable. Someone with experience working an extra two hours on a project he's been tending all day is apparently only as productive as a new kid just starting his shift, groggy from sleep and unaware of the project's current state.

Then of course there's the issues of which industry you're working in, attitude, office politics, and so forth. Articles such as this one often consider all the many unemployed able people as interchangeable, but they really aren't. While so many people are looking for work, there are also many companies looking for employees already - the requirements of the two sets just don't overlap often enough to eliminate unemployment.

This facile analysis falls for the trap, so brilliantly outlined in The Mythical Man-Month [wikipedia.org], that throwing more people at the same software problem will result in increased productivity. Because of networking and communication problems, the reverse is often true. While I don't doubt the problems of overtime are a serious issue (and should be minimized), the reality also is that his "cure" isn't. It continues to amaze me how people know so little of our own history in this realm.

The lesson of Mythical Man-month is more that you can't make up for bad scheduling by throwing more people at the project in the middle, that adding more people to a late project will make it later. It especially focuses on productivity with respect to time.

If you throw more people onto a project from day one of a year+ long project, you sure can expect more productivity.

10 engineers can be 10 times as productive working for a year as 1 engineer. What fails is if you have 1 engineer working for 11 months, then adding 99 more the last month, and expect to equal the productivity of the 10 engineers working for a year solid.

9 women can't make a baby in a month, but 9 women can make 9 babies in the same amount of time it takes 1 woman to make 1 baby.

It is better to have 5 engineers rather than 4 overworked ones, if they all start projects together.

10 engineers can be 10 times as productive working for a year as 1 engineer.

No they can't.

You do gain productivity by adding more people to the project from the beginning, certainly, but the output does not scale linearly. In my experience, 2-3 good engineers may well be a little more than 2-3 times as productive as one good engineer -- at the low end more perspectives leads to better solutions which are easier to implement. But once you get much larger than that, the overhead of communicating and keeping everyone in sync becomes significant.

When you get up to about five people, at least one of them has to devote a non-trivial percentage of their time to coordinating the work of the others, and doing that sucks time away from the others as well. At 10, you're going to have a hard time if one of them isn't almost fully dedicated to project management, or unless you break into subteams and spread the PM load.

All in all, given good people, I'd say that 10 engineers are about 8x as productive as one engineer.

Lets move away from an hour based work schedule to a task and accomplishment based work/pay system. Base salary and flexible hours. Penalties for work not completed or as a corrective measure. We don't measure lives in hours, why should our job's measure what we do for them in hours?

Mandating an "hours per week" for employee's is the problem, not the solution.

You won't be able to celebrate your next birthday until you have reached a set list of objectives and accomplishments.

Under the new "pay-per-accomplishment schedule" birthdays will be measured as such:

1 - Must be able to walk before you are allowed to turn 12 - As soon as you can go a week without an accident or wearing a nappy/diaper you turn 2 years old (and have completed all requirements for ages above)...etc...etc...

17 - you are not allowed to turn 17 until you lose your virginity. (and have completed all requirements for ages above)

18 - You are not allowed to turn 18 until you have completed 4 difficult video games(and have completed all requirements for ages above)... etc... etc...

28 - you turn 28 years old when you get married (and have completed all requirements for ages above)

29- you don't turn 29 until you have a mortgage. (and have completed all requirements for ages above)

30- You are not allowed to turn until you have your first child (and have completed all requirements for ages above)

You get the idea... you turn 60 when you use preparation H on a daily basis.

Now age is entirely merit based and not on some silly time measurement.

In European counties such as Denmark where on the whole the standard of living and quality of life are better than the US, people work less than we do. They have more time with their families enjoying life instead of killing themselves at the office. Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.

Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.

It's tied to one of the great lies of American culture: "If you're smart and you work hard, you will become super-rich."

American culture is all about this. We want to point to people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump and say, "Look at these men! They came from nothing, and through their own intelligence and hard work, they became rich and famous." Of course, they didn't come from poverty, and they didn't achieve success through intelligence and hard work alone.

But people believe these things, and they want to make the world a paradise for the super-rich so that one day, when they become rich, the world of opulence will have been preserved for them. Then they look at their own lives and say, "Whoa whoa whoa! Why am I not rich yet? The only two components to success are intelligence and hard work, and it can't be a lack of intelligence because I'm incredibly brilliant. It must be that I haven't been working hard enough." And it's in this way that we convince ourselves that everyone who is poor is lazy and/or stupid, and our problems would be solved by working more and trying harder. It's hardly ever considered that the answer might be a change in strategy.

Yes and no, but mostly irrelevant in this context. I'd say in the Scandinavian countries in general there's very low tolerance for huge wage differences, that one person is so much more worth than another person. For example here in Norway probably the best paid CEO is Helge Lund, who leads an oil company with $90 billion USD in revenue and 30,000 employees - he's paid a little over $3 million USD - in a country where the average full time job pays around $80k so about 40 times that. The prime minister is paid about $240k or three times average wage.

However, I have no impression that people try to out-do each other that way at work. Working yourself into the ground isn't well regarded, it's seen as destructive and a sign of bad management. So yes, if I was upper middle class or beyond, I'd probably want to move to the US because there's more "I want to be like you" envy than "I despise you" envy, not to mention the tax rates are much better. But I think you would find that the normal person is quite happy, and despite the economic hangups far more socially liberal than most of the US. Freedom is highly regarded, but not showing off superiority.

Commonly referred to as Jantelagen [wikipedia.org] here in Sweden. And all reports about it are spectacularly exaggerated. Yes, it exists. No, in reality it doesn't actually hold anybody back, except in the minds of the most ultra libertarian conspiracy nutheads that (wrongly) also believe it's also impossible to get rich in the Nordic countries.

I'm sorry, but I'll take a snide remark about being "lucky" once every six months over 80 hour work weeks.

I worked in IT since 1986 and I have never had any fixed hours or overtime. It has always been about performance - how much you do.

Fixating on one factor that affects productivity is stupid. Let people decided themselves. If someone can do more in 40 hours than in 80 hours - fine. Let him do it. If someone wants to work 80 hours, fine let him doing. Ask about project progress, not how many hours he was logged in or occupied the chair.

I'm on a 35 hour week and I make sure I stick to it, partly because I don't know when I'll ever be on one again but also because I'm of the opinion that after 7 or so hours in front of a screen your ability think logically diminishes and no amount of over-time is going to fix the bug.

Leave the office, the chances are that you'll figure out the problem on your commute home, during dinner or on the john and you can fix it the following day.

Leave the office, the chances are that you'll figure out the problem on your commute home, during dinner or on the john

Or in your dream. It drives me crazy when that happens because then I'm doing work and not getting paid for it. If I ever become a contractor I'm definitely putting a line-item on the bill for dream work.

I've found there are three main reasons why people may end up working beyond their contracted hours:

1) The work that they have to do cannot be done during the hours they are contracted to work.

2) The work that they have to do can be done during the hours they are contracted to work, but the organisational or office culture puts pressure on people to be seen to be in the office outside those hours.

3) They have their own reasons for wanting to be working, which may range from a genuine passion for their work through to problems at home they would rather get away from.

Of these, 3) is generally not something the employer/manager should get involved in (unless home problems are starting to bleed over into the office).

I think that in most non-militant workplaces, people accept that 1) will occur from time to time and that, if it's for short periods, it's not a huge problem (particularly if the employer takes steps to recognise it and reward employees accordingly, be it financially, via time-in-lieu, or some other method). If it's not for short periods, then it absolutely will lead to morale and productivity problems and the employer/manager needs to think again about resourcing, or accept high staff turnover and problems with the quality of their outputs. This seems to be an endemic problem in certain industries (such as video games development) which are seen by outsiders as desirable places to work - meaning that there are always lots of eager young things waiting in the wings to replace burn-outs.

I suspect that the most common cause, however, is 2). Certainly, in the decade or so that I've been in full-time employment, I've come across quite a few offices where the work could be handled within contracted hours, but where the nature of the workplace culture meant that people were "padding" their working day; making tasks take longer than needed, or spending lots of time browsing the web in the afternoon. It's particularly noticable that workplaces like this seem to prize "being at your desk late in an evening" over "being there early in the morning". In part, I blame the shift to open-plan offices for this - there can be a "walk of shame" factor to leaving the office when your colleagues are still at their desks.

In one of my early management posts, I did try to tackle a culture like this in the office I was managing. I made a big thing about tracking how heavily loaded each team-member was and getting people to report when their workload reached the point where it would require them to work out of hours. I also made it gently but firmly clear that if your workload wasn't at that point, I expected you to get it done during normal office hours (happily, there was a wider organisational push at the time to reduce our power/lighting bills, which I could hook that onto).

For a while, it worked reasonably well. There was a bit of grumbling from a couple of people who, I suspect, thought that being seen in the office doing very long hours was a substitute for being any good at their job, but most people were happy to go along with it - and the quality of the office's work (which was mostly casework, requiring little creativity, but a lot of attention to detail) actually rose.

Then word got out (falsely, as it happened) that there may be redundancies headed in - and despite reassurances to the contrary, everybody assumed that they way to avoid being singled out was to be seen in the office every hour of the day - so all the work I'd done went to waste anyway. Overnight, things went back to being as bad as ever - and productivity fell off again.

I've not worked in Japan myself, but have heard similar stories from colleagues who have. I gather it's particularly bad for younger staff, who have "more to prove" to their employer. Without wanting to get too much into pop-sociology, you have to suspect a link between a work culture like that and Japan's birth-rate problems.

I do think that open plan offices are a big factor in making the "presentee-ism" problem even worse. I've only worked in one building that was definitively not open plan - it was a historic building subject to so many protection orders that, much to the frustration of senior management, even thinking about knocking an interior wall through would land you in jail. People either had their own offices, or worked in offices shared by 2-4 people.

By and large, people worked to the demands of the job. Our work there was highly prone to seasonal variations; you'd get months where you'd be doing 12 hour days and months where you'd be done in 6 - and people worked those hours, on the understanding that it all evened out. We took pride in our work and, by all indications, were good at it.

Shortly after I left, senior management found some open-plan accommodation in a newer building (which was more expensive - but the corporate drive in favour of open plan was so strong that mere cost wasn't allowed to stand as an obstacle) and relocated everybody there. According to my former colleagues, what followed was 2 years of hell and a serious drop in performance.

But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.

In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.

But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.

In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.

Then it's STILL the boss's fault. The manager's job is to manage his people, and if they're routinely committing to deadlines that require massive overtime to meet, then he's not managing them effectively.

The idea that you could end unemployment by spreading the work around assumes that people are fungible -- that they are completely interchangeable -- which they most certainly aren't. While it may sound like a good idea for Craig and Nate to share the job of coding System X, the fact is that Nate is 10X better at programming than Craig is.

The CEOs of the fortune 500 companies have all just met and decided they are going to push for a 40 hour work week. The only slight catch is- they're pushing for a week to be redefined as 3 days long and weekends are being abolished.

This has got to be one of the most obviously nonsensical submission summaries I have seen. Firstly it talks about how people would get more work done if they didn't do overtime. Then it suggests that overtime is responsible for cutting down number of jobs. The second points very existence relies on the first point being false. If people doing 40 hrs are more effective then less overtime would increase the work done per person and thus decrease the need to employ more people.

We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."

When the fake, corporate controlled news this week was saying "how could the unemployment rate possibly be going down and the private sector adding jobs when GDP growth is only 2%???" as if they don't know full well why. It's because the private sector has squeezed every drop of productivity out of every stressed out worker it possibly can and finally HAS to hire (at huge discounts from a few years ago, since you're desperate now). Since there's no labor organization, nobody can go to their boss as a one person union and demand less working hours (they'd laugh in your face), corporations go by different measures of productivity because they know you don't dare. Yeah, that's the reason the hiring doesn't exactly match GDP growth. It's a rotten arrangement and until everyone gets the anti-union sentiment they've had hammered into their brains by *massive* corporate propaganda campaigns for 40 years, this is how it's going to be, so wise up or deal.
Luckily the company I work at is privately owned and not subject to the torture of the merciless shareholder whip. That's really the problem with society overall. Corporate charters...and that's what is so confusing to people. They meet their CEO and he's such a nice guy and he cares about the environment and homeless people PERSONALLY, but in his INSTITUTIONAL ROLE, he's subject to INVESTOR LAWSUITS, if he doesn't operate like a psychopath and squeeze every drop of productivity out of everyone and every drop of profit out of anything at ANY COST. All externalities, like people, the environment, morals aside, he is BOUND BY LAW which is clearly spelled out in almost every corporate charter to do anything he can, screw anybody he has to, to get as much money as he can. If you don't get that, you don't understand how things work. Until the structure and mission of corporations are changed, you can whine all you want and nothing is ever going to change. GET IT? Seriously people stop being so pathetically naive. When it's profit first at any cost, problems ensue.

You'll be comforted to know that a good deal of the worlds oil production in is done by thousands people who are contracted to work 12 hour days, 6.5 days per week, for 4 to 6 weeks per hitch. This is usually after killer jet lag, since the majority of them fly 8-20 hours to get to work. I know, I did it for a couple of years.

All that explosive, environmentally dangerous stuff managed by people who are impaired due to continuous overtime and lack of sleep? How could that be a problem?

What you need is a change in the "exempt" laws. Here in Norway the only people that are exempt are those in management and particularly independent positions, simply being a white collar worker is not sufficient. As long as you have fixed or semi-fixed working hours, as long as you have no power of delegation or to organize your own work (really free like where, when, how you want as long as you meet your deliverables) you are not exempt. There are also some laws on maximum overtime but in all honestly both employers and employees often ignore that as long as they get their overtime pay.

That gives the right incentive that employers would rather hire people at full rate than have people work for time and a half. That penalizes inefficient workers and slackers who can't make up for it by working extra time - forcing you to work extra time to stay "even" because employers lose money when you need overtime to finish what others finish in regular hours. As long as the US is full of "exempt" workers whose work is still measured in wall clock hours, you will continue to get screwed because another hour is a free hour. It's like trying to keep the flies away after dipping yourself in honey.

Hmm. I know quite a few rich people, because part of my job is working with donors to my University.*Most inherited their wealth.*Those who didn't came from well-off families, who got them jobs out of college or funded their businesses.*Those who are self-made generally made their fortune selling real estate, or on Wall Street (so they produced nothing).*There are a handful (out of hundreds) who started a business (bars, dry cleaners, etc.) and made their fortune by working really, really hard, then buying out the competition, which put all those other small business owners out of work.

But it's all immaterial; it's very rare for Americans to move out of their parents social class, because the people who surround you make up you safety net. Poor people who fail have nothing to fall back on, and will go from having a little to being destitute. Rich people who fail will still be rich.

People really need to learn this and take it to heart. Unfortunately the myth of social mobility through hard work is so ingrained in American culture that it'll probably never be rooted out completely and exposed as the lie that it is. It's too convenient a motivator for the masses for the rich to let it fade away easily or completely. It doesn't even require any kind of conspiracy. It's an emergent system that forms from each rich individual doing their own thing.

Social mobility is empirically higher in Europe. There is a good body of peer-reviewed data on this. Your sample of under 300 wealthy Americans is not appropriately sized for a population size of 300 million, plus you are beginning by selecting for upper class members in the first place, ultimately reinforcing, if anything, the parent's post.

Friend you appear to have engaged mouth before utilizing brain. Of course there are more millionaires, the dollar is only worth 6 cents... do the math.

The question you posed is social mobility and it has never been worse in the United States. In fact social mobility is significantly greater in most of Europe than the U.S. and all you had to do was a quick search [huffingtonpost.com] to find that, or perhaps you did and chose to ignore the truth to make your point.

The top 400 wealthiest people in this country now have the same wealth as the lower 170,000,000 citizens. Can you see the problem. The wealth is locked up in the hands of a vanishing few. That means there's nothing left for the rest of us. Your comment above about millionaires is precisely the problem. With a vanishingly few exceptions, the masses are being locked into futures unable to afford decent educations, social service or viable means to escape their condition and things are getting precipitously worse. Add age discrimination and a failing network of services for the poor and serious ugly is just around the corner. French Revolution style ugly. Why do you think we built up a private security army (yes, I know, make Dick Cheney one the super-wealthy.) Their use in Iraq was just the testing grounds.

There is a significant difference between being at work 60-80 hours a week and working 60-80 hours a week. I have many people who do the former, very few who can maintain the later, at least not long term or without suffering serious consequences. I'm not saying it's impossible or it doesn't happen, but most people who work 60-80 hour weeks for any length of time are doing it for show after a point.

All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year. If you enter only 58h during a week, there will be a follow-up inquiry on monday morning for why you missed your quota by 2 hours. This is only a minimum, you are also expected to be available to work all nights and all weekends. Further, such work conditions are not restricted to busy season, and the majority of employees should expect these conditions for at least 6 mo. of the year.

It just becomes the new normal. A 60-hour week becomes a treasured vacation, you get to go home and eat with your family, maybe even talk to them a little before bed. When the hours creep up to 70, 80, and beyond, you have no choice but to eat at your laptop in a conference room with the rest of the team, get home after everyone is already asleep, then wake up and leave before they wake up. Hopefully you can work from home on the weekends and at least have breakfast with your family.

Can hardly complain when I see some clients who have it worse though. SVP of Finance hasn't left the office in 4 days. The finance department just collapses onto a couch for a few hours a day.

These work conditions are demanded by the market. There are set filing dates for public companies, and they, as well as their auditors from the public accounting firms, need to work to match those deadlines. The client I mentioned above missed their filing deadline and filed for a 1 week extension. Their stock price fell by 10% that day.

It's just accepted. This is standard industry practice, and everyone is expected to suffer through it for years, because public accounting experience is the most rapid way to accelerate a career in accounting. Ultimately everyone hopes to leave for private accounting after accumulating 3-6 years of public accounting experience. Nobody was forced to take jobs in this line of work, everyone chooses to give up 3-6 years of their life for the promise of a better life when they can someday quit and take an advanced private accounting position. I hate my life during these stretches of insanity, and I definitely wish I could work more reasonable hours. But like everyone else in public accounting, we take on these ridiculous hours because we know it's the best way to move our career forward. I fantasize about quitting all the time, but I need to make as much money as possible so that I can take care of my family. If I give up early so that I can have it easier, my family won't be able to afford the same kind of lifestyle. I wish I was more clever, or had some valuable talent that would allow me to make a lot of money with a more reasonable workweek, but that's just not the case. In a few years, I will be able to have time with them, and I'll have the money to take care of them. We're all just chasing the American Dream I guess.

I'd quit now and learn to live with a lower-cost lifestyle. You don't need cable; free TV is good enough. You don't need unlimited cellphones; $5 or $15 a month for a few hours calling is good enough. I'm not sure if you can sacrifice on internet but I do: it only costs me $15 a month............. Otherwise you might quit your 70 an hour week job circa 2020 and discover your wife is a stranger, and your kids are teens who don't want anything to do with you.

For a few years, when my younger son (3 siblings) was a teenager, I had to work for a long time as a consultant, supporting a product. The customers were in different timezones, (gmt-4 to gmt-8). You can imagine the 5:30am start and the 8pm end. My wife and I decided that the family was more important than this job, and I changed careers. I can say that saved my son, because dad was home to act as the role model. The son also needed to ask questions that mom could not answer, and I was there.

Today, my wife and three siblings and grandkids all live in my city. We do without tablets, vacations to the south or boat cruises, and we note that we do not miss these material based things. My wife and I have no lack of any essentials, and we have the love of our children and their significant others.

That's not what the article is saying (it's not talking about the Greek welfare state model). It's pointing out that if you work too much overtime, you get burned out, less productive, and more prone to error.

Well, duh.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.

Ah, now you're talking! Manservant! My eugenics rifle! We shall see to it that the workingman of tomorrow is fit for a 50-hour week, and his offspring capable of 60! In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!

Seriously? Any time someone mentions that some people are better at certain things than others we immediately jump to eugenics? That's a bit disingenuous to say the least. I've been working 50 hour weeks for pretty much my entire adult life, and it's never really bothered me. If I cross 60 hours for a couple consecutive weeks, I get pretty shot and need a day or two off. My brother works 60 hour weeks almost every week, and it doesn't seem to affect him, but if he crosses into 65-70, he becomes an intolerable prick. Meanwhile, if my ex girlfriend worked a single 50 hour week, she was an incoherent bitch by the end of it. Now, I wouldn't argue that the average person's productivity drops off after a 40 hour work week, but only a fool would actually draw the conclusion that every single human being on earth is somehow hardwired to be unable to work more than 40 hours in a week.

I figured that the ridiculous tone of my post would make the fact that I was joking pretty obvious.

That said, the minimum requirements for jumping to eugenics are 1. Heritable variability in some ability(or, if one is feeling looser, stochastic variability and a willingness to overproduce and cull every generation. Not strictly eugenics; but similar) and 2. An incentive to improve the population level capability in that ability.

Ability to work long hours does fit, as do a wide variety of other work-related human attributes.

This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.

No, they are not. There are a lot of self-assessed "high performers" that think they are, but they are not. What really happens is that these people become so incompetent that they cannot see all the mistakes they are making anymore.

Yup. People think they can multi-task when in fact we mentally can not. What we call "multi-tasking" is actually task switching. The distinction is important. It's one thing to be multi-threaded in cognitive thinking which is impossible for most people than it is to time slice our actions. Time slice too much and you start dropping balls and making all sorts of careless mistakes. Basically, the human brain functions like a single core CPU. It can only process so much data at any given time. We're also horrible about real-time task scheduling because of external environmental distractions.

Who came off with the idea that having doctors work for hours that would be illegal for truck drivers? It's not like the lack of sleep and concentration could harm patients. It might be really interesting to find out how many people die each year, because the doctor could think straight anymore. Lack of sleep has a lot in common with being drunk, but a truck leaving the road makes a far easier news story than a doctor messing up medications because he just had another 24h shift.
The world would be a far better place if those responsible for such things had to face the consequences instead of those who don't really have a choice if they want to keep their job. I'm still dreaming of the day when an executive goes into jail because he risked the life of others by letting doctors (or other critical proficiencies) work insane hours.

Well, of course no one is "wired" to handle "excessive" work (since, by definition, "excessive" is just that -- but varies from person to person, environment to environment).

Einstein often worked long hours - perhaps he would have been more productive if he had taken five weeks vacation a year and worked Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM with lunch from 12 to 1 and a ten minute break at 10AM and 3PM the rest of the time?

People who truly enjoy what they are doing and have certain personality types can often work very long hours and be more productive per hour by doing so. I've had jobs (at startups) where I loved what I was doing and worked effectively 70+ hours a week (usually engrossed in interesting or puzzling problems when I realized I'd been at work for 14 hours and should probably go home). I've also worked at boring and unrewarding jobs where productivity dropped precipitously within 30 minutes after I walked in the door.

I only recall a few days in my life where I was "mandated to work overtime" - it just happens. In those cases where it was mandated by a misguided VP or Director, myself (and others) began to work 40 hours a week plus just the mandated overtime. Within a couple weeks the VP or Director stopped mandatory overtime, apparently having realized that those who were getting the work done were now working less and those who were not getting work done were just around the office more hours distracting those who usually got work done (and both groups were substantially grumpier). So, yes, in these cases individual and team productivity did drop.

Basically, if work is an interesting hobby that someone happens to pay you to do and you're a healthy high energy individual, 40 hours a week is a cinch. Working on an assembly line (or the IT equivalent) rarely falls in that category.

Actually, as a norwegian, my first thought was "Why would you want to increase work time?" - As our laws are very strict on those things, and is set to 37.5 hours a week (lunch is calculated as half an hour off each day).

The rules allow working overtime, but only in short periods, and only to a maximum amount over a certain period (don't recall exactly now).

In fact, I know people who were forced to take two weeks paid vacation because they've worked too much, and had to stop working a period to not break the law. The companies usually puts this in quiet periods when needed, so they have the option of overtime when they need it.

Seems to work well for us, at least:) You know, as a civilized country and all that.

How the *hell* did the parent comment get modded "+5 Informative"?!?! It mentions some *very* specific and *very* dramatic figured with absolutely no attribution. At least give it a cursory google for fuck's sake! [lmgtfy.com]

I swear, all you Slashdotters had better start learning Mandarin with this attitude.

Have you ever worked with Chinese people? Like real Chinese people, from China. My wife has - she's a graduate student, and a lot of the other grad students came from over there. She's even been to a Chinese university for a couple of months, to do some field and lab work over there on a grant.

At first, she was really disappointed in herself; she could see that the Chinese kids got to work before her and left really really late, and they'd even have lunch at their desks instead of going outside to eat.

Then she paid a bit more attention, and realized something: those Chinese students weren't getting shit done. Even though she put in fewer hours and would take a break for lunch, she was getting at least as much work done, if not more.

It's not that they're lazy or incompetent or anything like that, it's that they push themselves so hard they're all in this steady state of being half burnt out.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you're willing to work; there's only about eight hours per day of physical labor in you, or six hours per day of mental effort. Sure, you can put in more work for a week, maybe two, but after that the quality goes way downhill.

I worked for a Japanese company for 10 years. It was always super-important to be SEEN to be working - even if there was really nothing to do. If caught idle the boss would usually find some menial task for the idle drone to perform. Often quite demeaning. On the other hand, what was good about this attitude is that if there was some menial shit that really did need to be done the bosses and managers would pitch in and work along side the rest of the staff. So there was a sort of equality - all parts of the same machine (not saying that the machine part is good). It is a clearly different cultural attitude to work. As to my Japanese colleagues productivity, I'd guess mediocre at best. My impression is that in a company setting the best way to survive for Japanese workers is to be just average regardless of your real capabilities. The nail that stick up gets hammered down.

I am an American and I also work 37.5 hours a week. I work in the IT department of a large well known manufacturing company, and our hours are typically 8:30-5. And people here are almost always gone at 5. However, before this place I worked at a few different small consulting shops, and they worked tons of overtime. That is probably why I didn't last long in those places and ended up here.

Well, 32 hours per week in Germany? That would be exaggerated I think..

but, a lot of other stuff is true: Germans usually have a minimum of ~25 days of paid vacation a year, the average is more close to 30 (the minimum by law is 20 if you are on a 5 day workweek, or 24 if you are on a 6 day workweek). We also have a crapload of public holidays, which are always off (or you get paid mandatory bonuses above 100% plus)

The typical worktime in Germany I would say is still the 40hr/week.. with a lot of businesses doing 37 or 38, and in seldom cases, 42, so let's say it's around 40.Also, the regulations on overtime are a lot stricter here than in the US, like a guy above said about Norway.. and, at least for me as an IT guy, I can say that I never had to work an unpaid hour of overtime in my life (even though I'm not paid by the hour, I'm on a flex time model where I'm supposed and encouraged to take off any hour I worked overtime as soon as it is convienient for me. It is even prohibited by law to offer me a payout of my vacation days in the case that I couldn't take it all because I have so many overtime hours to get rid of - they have to give me the whole thing in days off (but for special cases like switching jobs))

Add that to the local social security, healthcare etc. and you have a compelling case of a decent work environment (as long as you are doing qualified work of course, unqualified labor sucks over here about as much as anywhere else..)

Oh and further down I read a lot of people talking about better salaries in the us etc.. so let me just break that down by my job, just for the fun of it..:

I'm 28, have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and work as an IT Systems Engineer - Exchange, Unix, VMWare, this kind of stuff.

This is how I get compensated:

40 hrs/week, 30 days of paid leave a yearA salary of $65.000 a Year (before taxes, after taxes I still keep about $40.000 a year,but note this is Germany - after taxes, I already paid my healthcare, my pension fund, etc)

I also get a $2000 bonus based on how the company performed at the end of the year.(We also have subsidized meals at the company cafeteria)

Also, every hour I work over my 40hrs/Week is getting billed to one of two time accounts:one for "necessary, but incentive" overtime, the other one for "ordered" overtime, which get handled like this: For the incentive overtime, I can take absence hours if business is low, for the ordered ones, I HAVE to take absence hours as soon as possible to get my compensation in free time.

Also, I get paid 25% extra on every hour I work after 8pm, 40% on every hour I work extra after midnight,50% for work on Saturdays and Sundays, and 125% for work on bank holidays - i can choose if I want to have this bonus in money equivalent or time equivalent.

also, I work on flextime, so I can more or less come and go as I please (there is no clock to punch, you just book the time you did on a tool based on your own recalling) as long as business needs are fulfilled and we have the necessary staff on site at all times.

Also, if I have to travel on business - all the time I spend traveling, be it at the wheel of a car, on a plane, on a train, waiting for a connecting flight on an airport etc pp - is considered worktime. so if I leave my home at 6am in the morning and arrive at a customer site at noon, I actually "worked" 6 hours going there - minus the time it would usually take me to go to the office, which is substracted by law.

I guess some people can understand now that we Europeans don't really consider the US to have a good work environment..

P.S. no cubicles, I share my ~220sqft office with only one colleague. And they allow ICQ and headphones at work officially.

It should be pointed out that the Germans are also strongly Socialist. Much more so that in the US. The differences between Greece and Germany are many: Greece has a much smaller population, many fewer natural resources, quite a bit more corruption in government, and their finances were poorly managed for decades; but the government safety net is the same in both countries. Honestly it's probably better in Germany now, with all the cuts the Greeks have had to make. It's certainly true that the Greeks are looking for bailouts mostly from Germany, and that the way they were running their government was unsustainable; but if you're pointing at the Germans as a model of how it "should" be done I want my socialized medicine, awesome state sponsored public transportation, employee-centric employment laws, 5 weeks of vacation... well you get the idea. I'd be pretty happy if the US swung far enough to the left to look anything like Germany.

Before you start accusing me of wanting other people to do my work for me, I should point out that I'm a skilled, well paid, degreed worker. I'd probably lose money paying taxes like the Germans do, it's true. I can live with that. Taxes are the price we pay to live in civilization. (That said, I'd be pissed if my government managed the tax money I put in as poorly as the Greek government did)

It wasn't statutory, but the average working week for a software guy was around 37 hours. Sure, we were paid less than in the US, but we weren't expected to be there all hours, we got five weeks of holiday a year which we were expected to take, and well, life was good.

Not quite as good as Australia. Australia is currently swimming in mining money, so the salaries are as good as the US but the hours are European.

That's just not correct. The employer is not paying for negative productivity. The employee is welcome to burn himself out and the employer can just hire a new one. Employees are easy to get these days. Even ones with hard to get qualifications. There's more population than there is demand for labor. Expect this trend to continue and wealth to continue to concentrate in the hands of the capital holders.

Work consistent 80 hour weeks and you are a wrecking ball. Everything you touch has to be redone. That's bad if you are an assembly line worker. If you are an engineer it's much worse. If it goes a while before it gets redone it will cost much more.

Productivity goes negative. I've seen it many times.

Some people start with negative productivity. I've never seen one of them overworked to the point they become productive though.

This is why capitalism is ultimately doomed, just as communism and fascism and all the other isms failed. The simple fact is that thanks to technology the people here right now, much less those just being born? Well about 40% of those are simply not needed, their labor is no longer required thanks to automation and technology. We are playing IQ musical chairs when the average IQ is barely 100 and more and more simply won't get a seat.

In the old days one who couldn't pass college could work in a factory and feed themselves and their families but not anymore, those jobs are gone to Asia where the corps can pollute to their evil heart's content. and soon even college won't help, I was talking to the dean of our local college and he figures about 35% simply won't find a job in their field once they graduate, no matter what field they choose. there is simply more labor than is required and thanks to H1-Bs the market is even more skewed thanks to stuffing the channel with even more workers. Hell I'd argue about 40% of the low end jobs in the USA are being subsidized by the American taxpayer as "make work" for example if you go to work at Walmart one of the first training videos you will be shown is how to apply for food stamps! Now how many think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't automate many of those jobs, nothing about stocking or scanning products that couldn't be done by machine. Same thing with fast food, its all a limited choice set anyway and that kind of assembly line work, using pre measured ingrediants in a line, hell you'd probably cut down on waste and screwups by just making the entire thing automated. you'd just slap the money or CC in the machine, push a couple of buttons and the food would pop out of a slot.

So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement, otherwise that end could be quite violent. Much of what we saw during the Arab Springs could easily happen here as we have "jobless recoveries" which is just a code word for "The rich are living like Gods while everyone else suffers" which of course breeds hatred and contempt. We simply have to accept the very basis of the entire system, trading labor for capital, simply no longer works. What do you do with those millions upon millions who simply don't have the IQ required to become doctors and lawyers? hell 25% of lawyers graduating can't find jobs as we have more lawyers than jobs now. In the end we simply have to face the fact that we are quickly approaching half a billion people in the USA and with just current technology we could get by just fine on 100 million, maybe less. What do you do with the other 400 million? without consumers our service economy collapses, do you pay them to just buy shit and watch TV? Do you make up "make work" jobs where they do some pointless task simply so they can get a check? Even in IT we are seeing the coming of smart gear that can take care of itself and call a parts monkey when something breaks, construction they are already testing a road building machine that uses GPS, no real humans needed there, and houses can be prefabricated.

So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed? we need to think of something or its gonna get nasty. The minorities are already looking at 25%+ unemployment and the whites won't be far behind, there are simply too many people and not enough work. What do you do? put them in camps? False flag an attack that can wipe out large numbers of them? Just leave them in the street to starve or create huge crime zones? gotta do something as time is running out folks, the tech just keeps getting smart while the average person stays the same or even gets dumber.